Introducing Airplane Mode, a GQ Podcast About Living Healthier and Smarter

Listen only if you want smart people giving real advice on how to stay sane in an insane world.

Listen to Airplane Mode free on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

For a while now GQ’s Level Up coverage has been aimed at helping you live a little smarter and a little healthier by stealing insights from people who’ve thought deeply about what it means to keep your head straight in crazy times. Everything from kicking your bad habits to reading 80(ish) books a year. Good news: if you drive to work, own headphones, or hate to read, we're now taking these conversations to the airwaves with Airplane Mode, a new podcast from GQ.

It's a weekly podcast hosted by me, Clay Skipper, GQ staff writer and a man relentlessly in search of how to upgrade...well, myself. Each episode I'll be having conversations with deeply cool, creative, successful, thoughtful people who are reckoning with all the complications of being a human right now. I'll have guests like writer/strategist/podcast host/super-slasher Aminatou Sow talking about how to be better online when the Internet's always tempting us to be assholes. And former professional poker player Annie Duke explaining why we're so bad at being wrong—and how being okay with being wrong might actually be a useful skill. Filmmaker Bing Liu, the mind behind the Oscar-nominated documentary Minding the Gap, goes deep on ghosting and the other perils of sex and dating as a millennial (which is, not so coincidentally, the subject of his next documentary).

We called the podcast Airplane Mode because that's the switch you flip when you want to step away from the noise and regain your sense of purpose. Our hope is that each of the ten episodes in the first season can recreate that time and space—even if you still decide to scroll through Instagram while you're listening.